The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

My eyes are slowly closing.  I am sitting in the front row but I am struggling to stay awake.  There is something about this presentation that is not working.  I thought, it must be me.   I must be tired.  Later however I realized the problem.  I was being lulled into sleep by the monotone delivery of the presenter.  Now there was no excuse for this, because the language was English.  We know that...

Sport is a popular source of inspiration for corporate leadership.  Coaches attend off-sites and make good money telling business executives how to be better people motivators.  Sports journalist Simon Kuper made an interesting observation in his column in the Financial Times about famous football coaches falling into decline, supplanted by younger, more innovative rivals. These superstar coaches...

Cold calling always creates a debate amongst the sales community.  Some say it has seen it's day, others defend it as part of the sales resource bank for getting leads.  I don't think anyone suggests it has a high rate of success.  Yet, there are occasions when we need to call someone we have never spoken to before and who has never heard of us.  Why would we be doing that?  We may have spun the s...

When you are on the executive floor, the carpet is thick, the mood is quiet and the décor is sumptuous.  It is a world removed from the scramble going on floors below.  Maybe you are in your own President's office, shielded from the fray outside the door.  The further you place yourself away from the troops the harder it is to influence the mood of the team.  Of course, you have direct reports ove...

It sounds so obvious that we should have structures for doing our project planning.  Projects are part and parcel of the fabric of work life and they constantly arise.  It is surprising though that so many teams are busily working away with no structure whatsoever.  The project team jumps straight into arranging the details of the project, without giving any thought to how the project should be ap...

When we are haggling over the price with the buyer and they say, "this price is too high", "that is out of our budget", "we can't afford it at that level, can't you drop the price", "we never pay that much", "we can get it for less", etc., we are in a bind.  We want the sale, we want to make our sales targets, so we immediately go into discount mode. This is a big negotiating mistake.    I heard t...

Pricing is usually set by the boss and salespeople are just there to get out and sell at that designation.  The provenance of that price point can be quite varied.  In some cases, there is a careful calculation involved. It determines the necessary return to cover direct and indirect costs, plus make a specified margin of profit.  In other cases, a moist index finger is lofted skyward and a price...

We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience.  What makes the difference?  The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner.  Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life.  We see this with music.  The same lyrics, but with a different arrangement and s...

Projects are simply too common.  Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of our everyday work, but we don't approach them properly.   We certainly don't apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade boldly straight into the mechanics of the execution.  Why is that?   Poor leadership and a lack of skills make for dangerous dance partners, as the team la...

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets.  In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client's best interests.  We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer's needs.  We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that...

Sometimes you see a confident presenter really bomb.  It doesn't happen all that often, but when it does, the contrast is vast.  If they are totally hopeless as their default mode as a speaker and they bomb, well that is understandable.  But a competent presenter bombing shouldn't occur.  It did and I was wondering what did I just see?  Where did our speaker go wrong?  Comedians have this same pro...

We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don't.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  So you would think we would all be absolutely brilliant in this area.  We aren't and so why do we have resultant problems?  Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude. ...

Sales is one of the few things in business you can measure accurately and immediately.  Are you getting greater efficiencies from your internal systems?  Is the marketing working?  Are our team becoming more skillful?  Are our leaders effective? These are topics which are super important but also devilish to measure.  Sales however is straightforward – how much did you sell?  Therefore, there is n...

Education can be a barrier to intelligence sometimes.  This is often the case with people educated in very hard skill disciplines.  They are asked to absorb vast amounts of complex information and to follow strict procedural structures.  The rote learning aspect becomes paramount.  This is fine and will get you graduated out of varsity and into the real world.  With so much invested in technical k...

"We all have possibilities we don't know about.  We can do things we don't even dream we can do".  This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change in how people thought about the future.  Up until the 1920s, fate and God's will were the more common explanations for what would become of us.  Psychology research in the USA began to drive the idea t...

Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work.  We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it.  Buyers though are different.  They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us "no".  The rejection itself is not so much the problem, but how we respond to and deal with the reje...

When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored.  There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well.  It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice.  This is where the majority of lousy, b...

Peter Drucker has this great quote. "Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and under performance.  Everything else requires leadership".  That is a very profound and pithy observation by Drucker.  In this modern day and age, why do we still encounter these three horsemen of the apocalypse of organizational dis-function?  You would think we would be better organiz...

Bullying, humiliation, ridiculous stretch targets, rubbish goods, stress, shame – a toxic cocktail often suffered in the sales environment.  We often get into sales by accident.  There are not many varsity business courses in sales.  There is sales training available, provided by companies like ourselves, but often this is not offered by the employer.  The assumption is you look after yourself.  W...

You want to promote your business or organisation, so that you can be more successful.  A genius idea pops up amongst the brain trust over a few drinks after work – why don't we enter the Business Awards?  Someone has to win don't they, so the odds are fair. Anyway, there is no downside is there?  True but there can be, if you don't fully think this through.  I don't mean the requirement for polis...

Sakaiya Taichi, well known author and futurist,  made an interesting observation about the current trend of Japanese society.  He referred to Japan's current lack of yoku (desire), yume (dreams) and yaruki (guts).  What does this mean for business and for our companies if we are staffed by young people without these three Ys?  As leaders, how can we reverse this trend and produce more engaged team...

We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media.  It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states.  Most of these representations however have very little relevance in the real world of business.  A lot of the work done on negotiations focuses on "tactics".  This is completely understandable for any transactional based negotia...

Speaking in front of others makes many people tongue tied and nervous.  They struggle to get through a simple presentation, internally, in front of their colleagues.  A public audience is something they would flee from, screaming and waving their hands in the air.  Why is that?  We all learn how to talk.  The presentation is just a talk, so what is the big deal?  Yet, it is a barrier to many peopl...

We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don't.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  So you would think we would all be brilliant in this area.  We aren't and so why do we have problems?    Part of the issue can be allowing past failures to sap our mental fortitude.  We mentally re-run...

Time is of the essence.  Patience is a virtue.  Worthy aims but sometimes we mix these aspirations up in sales.  We are not moving quickly enough and miss the chance.  At other times , we are impatient and we force the issue when we should be more stoic and considered.  We lose on both counts whenever we confuse what we should actually be doing.   Being too slow usually relates to making contact o...